1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a rapid phrase identification method and, in particular, to a rapid identification method of Spanish derivatives in a programmed electronic device, such as an electronic dictionary, or in software, such as a phrase processing program or a computer-based dictionary. The invention can also be utilized to proceed spelling check and correction.
2. Description of the Related Art
For many types of electronic dictionaries or computer-based dictionaries, if an inquiry item entered by the user can not be found in the database, the user will receive a negative response, such as xe2x80x9cno such itemxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9cphrase not foundxe2x80x9d, or get the closest phrase in spelling or pronunciation. However, sometimes, apart from misspelling, the inquiry item may be derivatives or compounds of elementary phrases, so-called etymons, and are not included in the database. Therefore, the responses like the above-mentioned ones seem improper and useless.
It should be pointed out that European languages such as Spanish and Germany usually have a variety of derivatives for a single phrase; especially for Spanish, a verb may have more than one hundred derivative forms. In Spanish, the vocabulary can be classified as etymons, compounds, derivatives and combinations thereof. Basically, an etymon is an elementary phrase on its own; a compound is formed by combining two or more etymons, or attaching a prefix to an etymon; and a derivative is derived from changing an infix or a suffix or both of an etymon. Currently, usual electronic dictionaries only collect the etymons and a few common derivatives of them, which is obviously far from satisfaction for practical uses.
A trivial solution to this problem is to include all the derivatives for each etymon in the electronic dictionary. Nevertheless, this method will demand large memory space to store all Spanish vocabulary, which is wasteful and requires much effort to input relevant data. Thus, it is greatly desirable if a more efficient method with less memory requirement can be provided for phrase identifying, searching and checking in a device like an electronic Spanish dictionary or computer software such as the Spanish phrase processing program.
In observation of the disadvantages in traditional phrase identification devices or software, the instant invention provides a rapid phrase identification method.
An object of the invention is to provide a rapid searching method for Spanish derivatives.
Further, according to the present invention, a coding method is provided for rapidly searching of Spanish derivatives in a computer or the phrase processing software.
The invention also provides an efficient method of checking Spanish vocabulary spelling and correcting the misspelled inquiry item by providing a list of possible candidates close to the inquiry item in spelling or pronunciation.
To embody of the present invention, the following steps have been carried out:
(1) collecting and categorizing all the rules for obtaining Spanish derivatives of each etymon;
(2) indexing these rules by a coding method; and
(3) sorting the indexed rules and forming a look-up table.
Furthermore, according to the invention, the searching procedure for each inquiry item is:
(1) to look it up in the etymon database, and output the stored data concerning the phrase if found, then stop; otherwise
(2) to check its affix with the derivative affix look-up table, and output the stored data concerning its possible etymons if any, then stop; otherwise
(3) to correct the spelling by providing a list of close phrases in spelling or pronunciation.
Yet further, according to the invention, the searching of each possible suffix-type derivative may be fulfilled by using a phrase transposition method; wherein, the letters of the phrase is firstly transposed in order. Thereby, one is able to obtain from the beginning of the transposed phrase all the possible suffixes, in reversed order though. Then check the obtained suffixes with known ones by resorting to the look-up table prepared beforehand. Keep the matched one in accordance with the maximal matching principle, find out the corresponding etymon suffixes and substitute them for the suffixes in the inquiry phrase to get the candidate etymons. Finally, look these etymons up in the basic database and see if any of them exists in the dictionary.